The construction of the past is as much an effort of imagination as of memory, although one could argue that memory is more involved with the construction of the past and imagination with the construction of the future; however the reverse position is not untenable. Imaginations of the future involve a calculus of memory. Equally, it would be surprising to many how much of the remembered past is projection of imagination, even with all of the learned tools and protocols of the discipline of anthropology. The grim truth of the manifest uncertainties of the deep past and distant future have led philosophers through the ages to focus on what appears from the human perspective the most concrete moment of time – The Present Now.
But let’s begin with The Way We Were which so richly informs the way we are, or at the very least, the way we think we are. How many of us have investigated our misty, water-coloured memories to try to recover the pictographic detail edited out, not so much by time as commonly suggested, as much as intent? Intent, both active in past and future projection, (the latter we call ‘aspiration’, the former we call ‘belief’), is the rose-coloured reverie of subjectivity that makes the grim reality of the present such a dynamic and creative space. The fact is many of us are unaware of what our deeply held beliefs are (and what they are not); and some are equally inarticulate with respect to aspirations. Navigating the netherworld of the Jungian shadow is strictly forbidden territory for most; we often remain trapped in the narrow narratives of the existential cultural and personal shibboleths we allow to define us.
It was Jung’s genius to recognize that whatever information is either affirmed or repudiated by deep-seated belief is edited in or out of that person’s reality as indelibly as the etchings of material reality on the experiential soul. I am starkly reminded of this truth when observing someone painstakingly reconstruct the shards of their own very carefully curated narrative of the past, completely oblivious to their own shadowy contribution. Beholding the self in such an unflattering predicament can be rather sobering. What are the opportunities missed by refusing to see some capacity of the self one finds, for whatever reason, disturbing; or some aspect or facet of the context in which one operates, which poses too much of a personal threat or challenge to candidly acknowledge? The potential enormity of the answer to that question is as tantalizing as tragic.
At what point does the tension between being dream fodder for imperial avarice and mourning the sacrificial slaughter of one’s own surrendered potentials and possibilities snap us out of somnolence into the sober alertness required for decisive victory? That, I declare is the zenith moment.
YeKengalé 